"Patrick Tilley - Mission" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tilley Patrick)

'Instead of where?' I asked, when we reached this conclusion.
'Wherever he went to when he disappeared from the morgue,' said Miriam.

What kind of' an answer is that?' I huffed,
'The kind you get when you ask that kind of question.
17
Now I am sure that some of you who have been f~1lowing this may already have spotted what seems to
be a deliberate mistake and maybe have even checked to see what it says in the Book. And the
question yOu're asking is - if he rose on the third day, what was he doing in Manhattan on
Saturday night? The answer is that the time in Jerusalem is seven hours ahead of New York. It was
already Sunday over there.
I mention this now, but it didn't occur to me on that fIrst fateful night. As I've said, we were
both trying to find a way to dismiss the whole thing because, even if one set aside the nut-and-
bolt practicalities of the time-travel hypothesis, it raised other issues which strained the
limits of credibility.
To begin with, it meant accepting that the event described in the New Testament Gospels and which
formed the cornerstone of the Christian faith actually took place. Until quite recently, I'd never
taken that part of the story seriously but, after the publication of the latest scientific
investigations of the Turin Shroud, I was prepared to accept the possibility that something quite
extraordinary might have occurred. And if, as rumoured, the alleged image of Christ had been
sealed into the linen by some process involving cosmic radiation then, clearly, we were into a
whole new ball game.
For it meant accepting not only the reality of time-travel, hut also the simultaneity of time.
Which meant, as I understood it, that Einstein had got it wrong. For if our tentative ~planation
was anywhere near the truth then our own births, lives and deaths had occurred in the same instant
as that in which the body of Christ had been transported from the first century AD to our own. And
as he lay in the alleyway over on the East Side and later on that slab in the morgue, four Roman


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guards were lying blinded outside a rock tomb in a Jewish cemetery near Jerusalem and, if the
scientists were right about the Shroud, maybe even dying from radiations burns. While we sat in
Miriam's apartment on 57th and First, his life and ours and all the events in between co-existed
simultaneously along with every other event from the beginning to the end of the world - and the
universe itself.
As you can imagine, the implications of such a concept were too stunning to even begin to
contemplate. What we needed was reassurarice. 'I'he comforting thought that our world was still as
it had always been. That everything was as we perceived it to be. And so we tried to convince
ourselves that what we had witnessed had not really
happened. After all, visions of Christ, complete with stigmata, and of the Virgin Mary had
appeared on numerous occasions to more than one witness. In some cases over periods of several
hours. Days even. But to avail ourselves of this escape route meant explaining away the fact that
the cops in the squad car, the crew of the ambulance, the admission personnel on duty in Emergency
at the Manhattan General, Wallis, Lazzarotti, the morgue attendant and the two of us had all been
exposed to different segments of a unique hallucinatory experience.
Maybe Saint Teresa or Saint Augustine might not have had any trouble taking something like this on
board, but ecstatic visions were definitely not part of our scene in spite of the highs we'd had
whilst sharing the odd joint.